Such is our Krazy. Such is the work which America can pride itself on having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich with something we have too little of—fantasy. It is wise with pitying irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal, the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery foam—all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.
The Damned Effrontery
of the Two-a-Day
THE DAMNED EFFRONTERY OF THE TWO-A-DAY
The narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New York Tribune; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield is Richard himself again, the actor who played Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde better than Thomas E. Shea did:
“As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield turned to me and with venomous indignation said, ‘That is damned effrontery!’ It seemed to be Mr Mansfield’s belief that mere dancers had no right to wear the vestments of refined society.”
To me that is a very funny story and the humour of it has nothing to do with upon what meat has this our Cæsar fed that he is grown so great. The eminence of Mansfield and the worthlessness of Montgomery and Stone may be assumed; the recrudescence of the mediæval attitude toward strolling players, even if it be in the mind of another player, is also conceivable; snobbism is always conceivable and often interesting. The story is funny because it so perfectly illustrates the genteel tradition in America. (I am rather freely applying Mr Santayana’s phrase, without any effort to do it justice.) Montgomery and Stone were in revue or extravaganza, and were therefore outcast; they didn’t count as Art. Whereas Mr Mansfield played Shakespeare and high-school girls went to see him, and so he was Art. The application to vaudeville is immediate, because vaudeville is considered on Broadway as the grave of artistic reputations. An actor of established prestige may venture into vaudeville; he usually makes his audience feel exactly how far he has condescended to appear before them and accept, even if he doesn’t earn, a salary three times as great as usual; but the actor in the middle distance very well knows that if he goes into vaudeville he is digging his own grave, because there is a stigma attached to the two-a-day. Vaudeville players, in short, are not entitled to “the vestments of refined society.” About every ten years the corrupt desire to be refined takes hold of vaudeville itself; but it dies out quickly and vaudeville remains simple and good.
It is in one of the stages of simple goodness now, and I propose to discuss it without reference to a possibly more noble past. I am well acquainted with the other method, which was founded, I believe, by Arthur Symons, and beautifully practised by him. To him we owe the peculiarly attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which, invented or borrowed by him, has become classic. It leads to excellent prose at times, and by showing that there was a golden age even in vaudeville sometimes creates the suspicion that vaudeville itself need not be all brass. But the attitude is unsatisfactory because it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts, more than a share of the pathos of distance. Vaudeville is brightly coloured, zestful, with sharp outlines; and the classic attitude softens and blurs. It is required of you to name and describe the acts and numbers of a better day; one must say “music-hall” or be slain in the passages of the Jordan; in America a reference to the commedia dell’arte is, as scientists say, indicated. Yet the time must come when it is possible to say, “Vaudeville is. Surely it could never have been worse than this—or for that matter, never better. Let us regard it as it is.” The moment must come in the history of general culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons. That is, it happens, the only way I can take it, for in my youth I saw little of it and cared less. I recall a skit called Change Your Act or Go Back to the Woods; there were Fours and among them were Cohans; there was, I remember, The Man Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat my breast and begin Einst in meinen Jugendjahren. Nothing I have heard leads me to believe that there were better days in vaudeville than those which open benignant and wide over Joe Cook and Fanny Brice and the Six Brown Brothers, over the two Briants and Van and Schenck and the four Marxes and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus; over Duffy and Sweeney and Johnny Dooley and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid Battling Dugan, and Messrs Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.
I shall arrive in a moment at the question of refined vaudeville, a thing I dislike intensely; there is another sort of refinement in vaudeville which demands respect. It is the refinement of technique. It seems to me that the unerring taste of Fanny Brice’s impersonations is at least partly due to, and has been achieved through, the purely technical mastery she has developed; I am sure that the vaudeville stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to perfect everything. They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly, without lost motion; they must touch and leap aside; they dare not hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time. They have to be always “in the picture,” for though the vaudeville stage seems to give them endless freedom and innumerable opportunities, it holds them to strict account; it permits no fumbling, and there are no reparable errors. The materials they use are trivial, yes; but the treatment must be accurate to a hair’s breadth; the wine they serve is light, it must fill the goblet to the very brim, and not a drop must spill over. There is no great second act to redeem a false entrance; no grand climacteric to make up for even a moment’s dulness. The whole of the material must be subsumed in the whole of the presentation, every page has to be written, every scene rendered, every square inch of the canvas must be painted, not daubed with paint. It is, of course, obvious, that the responsibility in this case is exactly that of the major arts. It is at least tenable that in this case, as in the major arts, the responsibilities are fulfilled.